Kurt Wimmer is a hack fraud. (Spoilers for 1984 Children of the Corn)

Children of the Corn is Kurt Wimmer’s fourth directed film in twenty eight years and after watching it I understand why virtually no studio will give the guy a job directing movies. For that matter looking at his writing credentials I’m not sure why any studio gives him writing jobs either, but I’m guessing he works for peanuts. His other three directorial credits are for Ultraviolet, Equilibrium, and One Tough Bastard.

I made a really bad mistake before watching Children of the Corn. I watched the original 1984 film again. I’m not going to sit here and claim that the original Children of the Corn is a masterpiece, but it is a very competently made film. It also grossed $14 million compared to the $500k this movie did. Definitely one of the better Stephen King adaptations from the 80s. The Kurt Wimmer version? Absolute garbage.

Children of the Corn is based on a short story by Stephen King where all the children of the small town of Gatlin Nebraska murder all the adults and form a cult around the corn and “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.” Obviously we could never get a 1:1 adaptation of the book since it’s a cocaine-fueled Stephen King story and as such includes children having sex and getting pregnant. Also the ending of that story was miserable, even by King’s standards. There’s a lot of biblical commentary in the book, and in the 1984 movie.

The remake meanwhile is definitely a modern film. It tries to shoehorn in sociopolitical messages that the writer clearly doesn’t understand and give its villain a sympathetic tale, as well as over-explaining how all the victims actually kinda deserved it. We’re not in Gatlin anymore, where the kids just up and murder all the adults within the first few minutes of the film. No, this is Rylstone. The film kicks off with a teenage boy murdering an orphanage full of adults while taking the kids hostage, leading to the police pumping in a gas that inadvertently kills the entire building full of children. This lets us know Wimmer is going to butcher the story.

Basically the movie sets up all the adults in the town as exaggerated villains deserving of their deaths. After destroying their crops with GMOs and agreeing to take a subsidy to abandon the town and not grow corn, the parents fall into the realm of either selfish assholes, abusive alcoholics, or sexual child predators, or some combination of the three. There’s even a scene where a dad laughingly points at his son, overly excited at the thought of all the abusing he’ll be doing later. In short the film goes out of its way to make you support the kids killing the adults.

One big problem with this movie is the leader of the child cult Eden, ironically named because there’s a lot less bible in this version, is played by Kate Moyer who is a cute kid. And that’s a problem because at no point does she come off as threatening looking or particularly menacing. The child actors are various shades of awful but I’d really hate to push any of it on the individual actor’s talent. I’m guessing most of the child cast is actually more intelligent and talented than the writer/director. Moyer is at her best when she’s giving a rousing speech, but again…None of it is particularly threatening.

Elena Kampouris plays Boleyn, the film’s protagonist. You may recall Elena Kampouris in her role as Alexia in the How About Notflix recommended Sandler film The Cobbler. Personally I miss these days of her doing more dignified film roles. Boleyn spends most of the film about to cry, possibly because the actress realized her contract was binding, and defeats the corn monster by stabbing it in its corn head. Does it have corn for brains? I know the director does.

The original film worked in big part due to its cast. Isaac and Malachi were brutal, they murder the town’s adults within minutes of the film’s opening and with no pretext. No long build up, no drawn out speeches (at the start), no justification. It leaves a lot to the audience’s imagination and good horror tends to do that. It also helps that John Franklin and Courtney Gains were some weird lookin kids.

There’s even a scene in the remake where the parents are all slowly buried in a mass grave, everyone too stupid to merely stand on top of the dirt as it is piled on top of them. There’s also a whole setup about whether or not “He Who Walks” (yeah they shortened it) is actually real or if this is all the hallucination brought on by people breathing in GMO dust and corn fungus. Dumb as hell.

Wimmer makes sure the movie explains everything to the point of insulting the audience’s intelligence, a point that would be less offensive if his career as a film writer didn’t out him as a blithering moron. This isn’t Wimmer’s first shitty remake that deliberately tosses out what works in favor of stuffing in a bunch of terrible ideas, and unfortunately it probably won’t be his last given Hollywood’s increasing desperation to get any shmuck behind the camera or in the writing room.

I’ll put it this way; Kurt Wimmer was a hack fraud in 1995 when he directed One Tough Bastard for release on HBO. At that time Ryan Coogler was roughly nine years old. In the interim, Coogler grew up, went through school, became a director, and wrote/directed Creed and Black Panther. Meanwhile Wimmer is still directing garbage like Children of the Corn. While Wimmer likes to claim he “retired” from directing due to creative differences over Ultraviolet, we all know you can’t retire from somewhere you weren’t invited to in the first place.

Rating: F